Biographer says Steve Jobs saw himself as ‘chosen’

Share this:

This book cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson.

The book "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson is on display at a book shop in Menlo Park, Calif., Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. The depths of Jobs' antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple's co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs' long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Copies of the book "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson are piled high at a book shop in Menlo Park, Calif., Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. The depths of Jobs' antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple's co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs' long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

A customer walks past some books " Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson at a book shop in Hong Kong Monday, Oct. 24, 2011. The depths of Jobs' antipathy toward Google leaps out of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple's co-founder. The book goes on sale Monday, less than three weeks after Jobs' long battle with pancreatic cancer culminated in his Oct. 5 death. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

A key to understanding Steve Jobs, his hand-picked biographer Walter Isaacson said, can be found in the Apple (AAPL) co-founder’s childhood in Mountain View.

Isaacson, whose book “Steve Jobs” goes on sale Monday, did an extended interview on the CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes,” in which he said that from early childhood, Jobs understood himself as chosen and special.

The program, which aired Sunday night and is on the show’s website, includes audio excerpts of Jobs talking with Isaacson during more than 40 interviews they did in creating the 630-page book. Their final session took place just weeks before Jobs succumbed to pancreatic cancer at his home in Palo Alto on Oct. 5.

“I was right here on the lawn,” said Jobs, pointing out his boyhood home as he recalled when a neighbor girl found out he had been adopted. “She said, ‘Does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?’ I remember running into the house crying. They said, ‘No, you don’t understand. We specifically picked you out.'”

At that moment, Jobs said he realized, “I wasn’t abandoned. I was chosen. I was special.”

That conviction that he had been selected, Isaacson said, stuck with Jobs his entire life.

Natural salesman

Isaacson, a former Time magazine editor who has written about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and is the CEO of the Aspen Institute, gained the trust of the obsessively private and secretive Jobs, who instilled a militant secrecy at Apple, headquartered in Cupertino. Jobs opened up to Isaacson, especially as advancing cancer caused him to acutely sense his mortality.

The seed of Apple actually sprouted, Jobs explained, when he and partner Steve Wozniak copied a “blue box,” a device that enabled users to make free phone calls. Wozniak thought of it as a prank; Jobs realized its business potential. He told Isaacson, “With Wozniak’s brilliant design and my marketing, we could sell anything.”

In his interview with correspondent Steve Kroft, Isaacson pointed out one of Jobs’ essential conflicts. Despite being a dedicated, antimaterialistic hippie, Jobs was driven to sell things. That disregard for consumerism — ironically part of the genius who stoked the world’s electronic consumer culture — stayed with him.

Even after amassing great wealth, Jobs lived in a modest house in Palo Alto without live-in help or an entourage. Early on, Jobs said, he saw how money affected Apple employees. “People bought Rolls Royces, they bought new homes, their wives got surgery,” he said. “These people who were really nice, simple people turned into bizzaro people. I made a promise to myself: I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.”

After he made his first fortune with Pixar, Jobs said, “I went from not worrying about money, because I was pretty poor, to not worrying about money because I had a lot of money.”

And yet, Isaacson pointed out, Jobs could be stingy and cold, a foil to the generous and outgoing Wozniak. Once, an engineer urged Jobs to join him in sharing stock options with a friend who had been with Jobs at Reed College, on his travels in India and in the early days at Apple. Jobs told him, “Yeah, I’ll match it, I’ll give zero and you give zero.”

Total control

Isaacson also talked about Jobs’ belief in the impossible, snarkily dubbed within Apple, “Steve’s reality distortion field,” from a Star Trek term. It included Jobs’ habit of demanding impossible feats from his engineers — and sometimes they delivered — to him owning a Mercedes sports coupe with no license plate. “He believed the rules didn’t apply to him,” Isaacson said.

Jobs also refused to believe in what he rejected. Isaacson related how Jobs tracked down his biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, and meeting their birth mother in Los Angeles. Although Simpson went on to meet their father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, who once ran a restaurant in San Jose, Jobs refused. “I learned a little bit about him, and I didn’t like what I learned. I asked her not to tell him that we met. And not to tell him anything about me.”

And even when Jandali mentioned to Simpson about meeting Jobs as a customer — not knowing their blood connection — Jobs refused to relent.

But Jobs did not give in to his need for total control in commissioning the book.

“He said, ‘There are going to be things in this book I don’t like, right?’ I smiled and said yep,” Isaacson said. “And he said, ‘That’s fine.’ “

Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775.

Isaacson on Steve Jobs

To watch the “60 Minutes” segments on Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, including a piece on what Jobs thought about Bill Gates and other competitors, go to www.cbsnews.com.

Sharon Noguchi covers preschool through high school for the Bay Area News Group. She's written about teen stress, high-school cheating, Common Core and teacher tenure. She also runs workshops aimed at developing high school journalists.

The agency’s hiring surge is only for half of the funds generated under SB 1; the other half is going to cities and counties for transportation improvements projects, which are also expected to generate new jobs.